


Iliac

by monstergabe (aproposity)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Animal Death, M/M, Minor Character Death, Reaper:76 Reverse Big Bang, jack is a fisherman so, some gross descriptions of eyes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 01:44:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12806880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aproposity/pseuds/monstergabe
Summary: It came from the sea.The war is long over, and the world has sunk back into the everyday rut of trying to survive. Jack Morrison, battle-scarred and drowning in maritime superstition, is cast off on the solitary shores of a fisherman's life and intent on building something with the little that he has.But the sea is an unfathomable, dread thing that does not concern itself with the peace that men try to find for themselves, and when the beaching of an unnatural creature coincides with the arrival of a stranger it threatens to drag him back in.





	Iliac

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the R76 Reverse Big Bang 2017.
> 
> I had the privilege of being partnered with the wonderfully talented [Pasic](http://pasicdarluth.tumblr.com), whose work served as the full inspiration for this fic and definitely responsible for it becoming far bigger than the requirements expected from me. All art is distributed in its relevant places throughout, and will continue through into the second part.

 

_They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains_

_The hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent._

 

***

 

It came from the sea.

 

How it came to be beached, Jack is not quite sure. The whales tend not to come inland, having learned long ago that the shore is as great a human threat as the vast ships that pass through their waters, and the sea had been docile through the night. Ordinarily his existence tends towards insomnia but he had slept well, as uncharacteristic a state for him as the sea’s own placidity, lulled to rest by calm waters. However, he had always slept light, and any noise of an animal suffering - dying - outside his door would have surely woken him.

 

It had not. Waking, he had gone through the motions of easing himself out of bed, ignoring the familiar aches and pains that he carried day-to-day and dressed without thought to looking outside. Why would he? There was no urgency to scrutinize the landscape he’d traversed for over a decade, that tended toward monotony occasionally broken by storms - and it had not stormed.

 

It was only once he had threaded fishing line to rod and shouldered a pack of supplies that would last him from dawn until sundown, until the night was lifting just enough to give colour and shape to things, that he had seen it and been brought to this moment. An old fisherman, standing at the shoreline before the hulking black husk of a - _something,_ mere feet from the weather-beaten little fishing shack he’s hesitant to call his own, willing himself to understand.

 

Facts, then. Jack has never seen a beached whale before; but then, Jack has never seen a whale quite like this. Its bulk is large enough to comfortably fit a grown man inside it, but whales come far larger than men and this one is sleeker than any prize brought down by sea hunters. Built for both stealth and speed, its skin is a rippling, oleaginous black and entirely free from the scars that seem to come naturally from any time spent out at sea.

 

Nevertheless, as small as it is Jack can’t simply write it off as a calf, misshapen and abandoned and making more sense than what _is:_ a creature that he has never seen before, from the ocean he’s spent his life upon. Its fins are huge, extending outward in sharpened, jagged points and pass in multiples down each side, tapering off into spines not unlike a catfish. The dorsal fin is disproportionately large, but lists backwards from its saddle like a drunken trooper, its point menacing and spear-like. Jack has seen sharks less prepared to wage war.

 

Not a whale, then. Something else. Jack presses a hand to its side, pebble-grey hair falling in twisted locks along its sand-flecked skin, and finds the creature still blood-warm to the touch. It is unquestionably dead; the inky black eye turned towards him shows as much sign of life as the marbles he would pocket as a child - barring his own reflection, caught in the burgeoning grey dawn in its gaze and warped to inhuman shape.

 

“What are you?” he asks, staring deep into that blackness, and the sea laps at the drying corpse with many tongues and stubbornly, spitefully, does not answer.

 

***

 

Jack retreats indoors to take stock. There’s meaning in this, he knows, the salt and the sea in his bones urging him to superstition. Warnings and blessings turn over in his mind, scrabbling for purchase and neither winning out. His existence is a simple thing: walk the sand and the swollen boards of the fishing docks scattered along the broken coast, give suitable offering, and take his humble share. If the share is less than humble, then off to market he goes, and spends his profit on coils of reel and freshwater ice. Honest living - as honest as one can be in the world - and more pious than most when it comes to the sea.

 

He is also riddled with fault, and the guilt nipping at his heels reminds him, lips curled and teeth bared: _you are less than holy._

 

So instead of crossing the creature on the beach, he does what any good fisherman would do. He makes himself comfortable, and he waits.

 

***

 

Dawn is finally breaking when the Shimadas arrive.

 

How they knew is a mystery to Jack. This length of the shore rarely receives visitors, and when it does they’re usually there to see Jack and not what the ocean may have dredged up in the night. It’s not impossible for someone to send word when travelling the road to town, but it’s too long for most to walk, and he would have heard a passing car.

 

Perhaps this is what Jack was waiting for, without even realising it. Or perhaps some humans, much like sharks, have the innate ability to smell blood.

 

Whatever the case, they are here and they came prepared. Hanzo’s blade runs deeper, but Genji’s is cleaner, and the lines they draw through the creature’s skin are bold yet strangely bloodless. There’s no sign of an offering, no trace of painted cockle shells or whalebone wrapped in seaweed braids, not even the gouges in wet sand from knees bent in prayer. Jack is not surprised. Their ancestors were dragons, that travelled from continent to continent and never learned to be afraid of the sea. Still, Jack watches the two brothers work and sees only men.

 

Genji notices him first, the weapon in his hand faltering incrementally at the same moment he realises he and his brother have an audience, and it’s his genial smile that brings him to the elder Shimada’s attention. Hanzo turns, the flencing tool flexing in his grip. He does not smile.

 

“This isn’t your prize,” he tells Jack bluntly. Not a question. If it _were_ Jack’s, it isn’t anymore.

 

Jack looks back to the creature the exact moment Genji is peeling back a long, thick line of blubber from muscle, pinkish-white and arterial red bared to the morning breeze and says, “No.”

 

Only then does Hanzo grace him with a smile, thin yet satisfied. “Good.”

 

He turns his back on Jack as easily as if he were never there, and drives the flared tip of his spear into exposed sinew. Genji’s eyes flicker to meet his again, briefly, and the smile he grants this time is a balm to heal the verbal wounds his brother inflicts, well-used and running thin.

 

This is how they work best. The two brothers are like oil and water; one, a welcome restorative, the other, liable to catch fire at the slightest spark. Jack has heard the stories: the Shimada heirs near-constantly at each other’s throats, the younger too flighty, the older too ambitious, each brother stifling the other by turn as they walk the path already paved for them by their shared name together.

 

Still, when united under a common purpose they work with a deadly efficiency that neither could achieve alone. In the case of dismantling the creature on the beach, they seem almost one entity.

 

Jack watches them work until the morning sky deepens from coral white to uneasy grey, until the meat is parcelled and the blood and sand mingle together into muddy gristle. The bloody job, which Jack has known at sea to take a crew of men and a handful of days, is reduced to little more than a morning in the back of a butcher’s shop.

 

Except, Jack has known butchers to at least hum along to the earworm of the day while they work, to occasionally take their hands from the carcass and crack the ache from their spine, perhaps step away entirely for a welcome break. The brothers do neither. They work in the silence of two people who have little in common with one another besides a common goal, with the added bullheadedness of sibling rivalry that demands to show no weakness for fear of later ridicule.

 

When that silence becomes oppressive, broken only by the squelching of fat and the cracking of bone and not a single gull’s cry, Jack retreats to the inner walls of the shack. His fishing tackle greets him where he left it. The rod and line is propped against his workbench, reclining in a gentle arc to the ceiling and the battered metal box filled with hook and bait huddles at its feet.

 

At once Jack thinks of dead skin sloughing off flesh, and the bile in his throat rises like the tide. His head spins, and the few steps to his bedside are a half-stumble. It comes to him like the fall of light spilling through parted clouds: the vulture-butchers, serving up the carrion of a sacred thing at market.

 

The sea won’t forget, he knows. The sea will have its due, will bring in the tide like a grasping hand and drag him back out with it. His spine curls inward, cringing, until his head is near parallel to his knees and the fall of his hair obscures the scars crossing his knuckles, pulled taut and blanching by the grip on the bed’s frame.

 

 _There was no offering,_ he thinks, almost hysterically. _Not one prayer._

 

Jack stays there, curled in on himself for the rest of the morning, until the noise of a running motor and a set of rubber tires crossing over sand intrudes upon the sound of breaking surf and cracking bones.

 

All at once there are men barking to each other, words snatched away by the rising wind until it reaches Jack as the suggestion of emotion: a flurry of excitement, a burgeoning greed, Hanzo’s voice cutting through it sharply before it gains too much traction and Jack can already see Genji’s placid, patronising smile in his mind’s eye that soothes, _I know he’s an ass, but what can you do?_

 

The rhythmic _thud, thud, thud_ as parcel upon parcel is thrown into an open bed bores through the shack walls, the rattle of flencing tools thrown down just as they are at the end of a hard day’s work at sea. The truck’s engine roars to life, wheels turning on sand and the truck peals off, away, past the natural line that cordons Jack off from the rest of them where sand turns to grass and a narrow country road.

 

He stays there long after the sound of human life has faded under the rolling tide, and when he finally uncurls he cannot look at the rod and line standing opposite, waiting, like a soldier at attention.

 

The ocean has seen too much blood today.

 

***

 

He gives it three more days until he ventures out again. In that time he wraps a candle in dried seaweed and places it into a ring of quartz, the stones mottled and misshapen and resembling a set of blanched teeth in the waxen light. It burns down to the seaweed, blackens it to a kindled thread, sends it smoking and Jack wills his remorse into the air along with it.

 

Whether it’ll be heard is another matter, and so on his final day of anchoritic solitude he takes a fish hook from his bait box and pricks his finger. He watches as the blood wells up in the maze of his fingerprint and drips, sluggish, into a mortar made of whalebone filled with sea-coins. The face of each is worn almost smooth, the embossed marks made by the minting press near-indistinguishable.

 

He is no stranger to this ritual. It served as reassuring protection at war, with an enemy ship fast closing in and the vanguard called to the rigging, and so Jack puts faith in it here, pocketing the coins once his blood as dried. They might prove worthless in the face of something more supernatural than an enemy soldier’s dry powder, but he takes comfort in them as he steps outside his own confinement, laden down with all that he needs: his rod, bait box and tackle, and the fold-up fishing stool slung over his shoulder alongside his rod.

 

The sight that greets him is bloodier than the last. He’d half hoped that the Shimadas would have been taken the creature from the beach wholesale, but they had clearly marked a greater value on some parts more than others. This value did not extend to its skeleton, which lies in grim memoriam, strings of fatty flesh still clinging to bare ribs. These grisly remains would make a valuable feast for the birds, but the sky overhead is unnervingly clear.

 

He takes a shuddering breath and steps around it in an uneasy half-circle to the north, keeping the same distance as it is from the door of the shack at all times. He had known the thing was dead, but now it barely resembles any form of life at all, and now that the Shimadas have peeled away the facade the danger in it strikes him harder than before.

 

It takes herculean resolve to turn his back on it, and no matter how many times he glances over his shoulder -  the creature growing ever smaller in the distance, until it’s nothing but a dark speck alongside the crooked square of his shack - the moment his gaze turns ahead the instinct materializes in the animal part of his brain. It is right behind him, and it is watching.

 

Of course, it isn’t. The creature is dead, beached, and cannot follow him; and even if it weren’t, he recalls the coins and knows that he is safe.

 

He rationalizes this as he reaches the first of his favoured fishing spots, an hour’s walk from home yet worth it for the prizes he’s caught in the past. He has made the journey from here in the evenings enough times to know the view behind him, with the bluffs encroaching along the beachfront like a stretching limb that obscures the view south.

 

The familiar surroundings are as much a comfort as home, and as he unfolds his perch and arranges his tools around it the day becomes indistinguishable from any other. With the line in the water, he can forget about the ruined remains of the creature on the beach and the Shimadas counting each bloody parcel, noting each weight and pricing accordingly. All is reduced to the drifting hook and the blood-pink body of the ragworm, drifting with enticement and parapodia fanning out in their hundreds.

 

All too quickly, he feels himself beginning to drift. Sleep is a longed-for thing, and rarely drags him under entirely, and so he allows himself to be taken away with it, confident that any tension on the line will wake him. The horizon blurs into a smudge of colour, then fades altogether...

 

A desert, not an ocean, extends in its barren vastness to the horizon and far beyond. It is a gaping nothingness, a mouth wide open and ready to swallow, and down the arid length of its throat there lies the rest of the world. It has taken the fish; the treasure; all of the ships that have set sail upon the oceans, ally and enemy both, and leaves Jack, perched atop all of this nothingness, the dock a wooden throne upon which he sits and dangles his impotent sprig of iron in a vain and bloodthirsty hope to take life where life no longer exists.

 

The wild emptiness seems to draw him in, spread wide and inviting, whispering on the dead breeze. _Jack…_

 

“Jack.”

 

His chin jerks up from where it had fallen to his chest and Wilhelm Reinhardt’s concerned face is there to greet him, one big hand jostling his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

 

Jack’s gaze snaps forward, but the sea is there, lapping at the coast like it always has, a glimmering jewel that he has spent half his life upon, and there are too many corpses holding up its depths for this to ever change.

 

“Dreaming,” Jack mutters back, hears himself, then clears his throat. The sun is still in the same place he’d seen it last; it could only have been a few minutes’ respite, but his voice is rendered hoarse from the days gone without speaking at all, and it is these little details that Wilhelm will take note of and file for later inspection.

 

He shrugs the concerned hand off lightly, with as little meanness as he can muster. It’s not that Jack’s ungrateful to see a friendly face. The journey from field to beach is a long one, and he can appreciate the time it’s taken Wilhelm just to place a hand on his shoulder and ask after him.

 

But it’s all that Wilhelm’s presence entails: the circular arguments and the gentle cajoling, that approach Jack like he’s simultaneously an invalid and a senile old man. And to think, that Wilhelm is his senior.

 

“It’s been much too long since we’ve seen you at market.”

 

“There’s a reason for that,” Jack replies gruffly, speaking into the collar of his shirt. “Can’t exactly turn up to market with nothing to sell.”

 

“I think we both know that isn’t the reason, Jack.” Wilhelm folds his massive arms, and Jack can’t bring himself to meet the gentle disapproval he can feel boring into the top of his skull. “Ana misses you.”

 

Whatever irritation Wilhelm manages to dredge up in him dies in an instant. Ana. He barely thinks of her anymore, yet the memory of her reminds him of just _how long_ it’s been. Too long, maybe.

 

“You know, Jack…” Wilhelm starts, and Jack knows well, has had this conversation with him before. “The fishing boats to the north have been making good these past few months. Almost enough to feed the entire region.” He takes a moment, for gravitas, for the weight of it to sink into Jack’s skin as if he’s telling him something he doesn’t already know. “Perhaps it’s time.”

 

The reflexive answer is a blunt _no_. If it were any other subject it would close the case entirely; but Jack has been saying _no_ for years and Wilhelm is still bent on repeating himself. Jack stares down at his scarred hands clasped loosely around the fishing line’s handle, and wills his grip not to tighten. Wilhelm will surely notice, and pass his innocent observations on to Ana, and then there truly wouldn’t be an end to it.

 

Perhaps it’s time to say something other than _no_ **.**

 

“I don’t mean to be so forward with you, Jack, but--”

 

“This is my life,” Jack interrupts.“I chose it. It’s the first damn thing I chose for myself in a long time. You’re asking me to give it up. But if I did, that wouldn’t be my choice either.”

 

“This is my life, and I won’t give it up.”

 

“If Ana were here,” Reinhardt says carefully, “she would call you stubborn.”

 

“She’d probably be right.” _She’s not here_ , he doesn’t say.

 

She had been, once. He had seen less and less of her in recent years until it became only Wilhelm, who barely knew him yet shouldered Ana’s love for him as if he could make it his own. He would make the journey from dirt field to sandy shore with Ana as the one-eyed spectre at his back, gently chastising the way only a mother can.

 

In truth, he can barely remember what she looks like. In his head she will always be from another time, in another place, caught in that moment when the young girl ahead of him on the naval gangway had tipped a few coins into the outstretched palm waiting for the conscription papers, and had transformed from Miss to Midshipman Amari right in front of him. She had stepped out of line and onto the ship deck ready to take her position, but not before glancing back at the boy next in line, who had kept her secret before he’d even realised it for what it was.

 

They’d fought a war together, and then she had retired to the fields with an armourer to make flour.

 

Wilhelm sighs heavily into the air. Jack keeps his eyes cast out to sea, where the blue-grey of sky and sea meet in a clear divide. They have played out this scene so many times before that he barely needs to be a participant in it at all to follow every beat of it. They have reached the anticipated impasse, the closing lines. He hardly needs to look around to know that Wilhelm - for all his size - resembles a kicked puppy, all because Jack’s silence has gone on for too long. The planks of the dock groan under Wilhelm’s feet as he starts to walk away.

 

“Wilhelm.”

 

The armourer pauses in his retreat. The eager hope that Jack has finally come to his senses, will _finally_ leave this dock to begin a soporific existence living in the back of a barn, is cloying.

 

“The Shimada boys. Are they selling the meat?”

 

Wilhelm hesitates for a moment, considering; whether he should tell him, whether Jack needs to know he’s now being beaten on two fronts at the market stalls rather than one. As if any of it matters. “Yes.”

 

“Don’t eat it.”

 

“What’s wrong with it?”

 

“They stole it.”

 

Wilhelm’s brows lower dangerously. “From you?”

 

“It wasn’t theirs. They never - they didn’t ask permission.”

 

“Jack…” Wilhelm sighs, and Jack knows immediately he has said the wrong thing. He has not treated this as delicately as he should and now he sounds exactly like they think of him: a paranoid old man, drowning in superstition and jumping at shadows.

 

“I mean it, Reinhardt,” he insists, tries for gravitas and falls short. “Don’t eat it. Don’t let Ana eat it. It’s...”

 

... no use. The conversation is already turning, all of Jack’s arguments losing ground when presented to a wheat farmer who begs for a good harvest by making human effigies out of hay bales and setting them alight. As ridiculous as Jack finds it - superstitious, a pointless waste of time and resources for something that won’t make the slightest difference - it’s only a mirror to Wilhelm’s own scepticism. Just as Jack only sees dirt, Wilhelm only sees water, and so convincing him of the foul play at work is fruitless in a way no effigy could remedy.

 

Wilhelm’s mouth is a thin line. “Jack. Please. This life you have - it’s not good for you. You must see that.” As if on cue there is a snag on the fishing line, a gentle tug as if to say _don’t forget about me_. Jack’s hands make the familiar motions, urging the hook to raise. He can feel the struggle of the fish in his fingertips, strong but waning quickly, and Wilhelm is still speaking:

 

“If you can find it in you, get yourself away from the sea.”

 

***

 

There is a man on the beach.

 

Jack does not notice him until he appears in his peripheral, fully formed, as if he were always there and simply waiting for Jack to pay closer attention. An incremental turn of the head yields his presence merely a few feet away from the dock, a waiting spectre in a hooded sweater.

 

Though Jack is startled he doesn’t show it. He turns in his seat just enough to assess him properly, to evaluate the rugged beard, the scars that pass the curve of his cheek so much like drifting, tender fingers and the build of a man who’s done more than a few days’ work in his life.

 

He looks to be the same age as Jack; or if his senior, then only by a handful of years. Old enough for the conscription, and so old enough to have fought the same war. This despite the colour of his beard, which - unlike Jack’s - retains its youthful colour with not a speck of grey. The black watch-cap on his head is a dead ringer for the same presented to Jack - along with the rest of his naval uniform - all those years ago, and just looking at it takes him back to standing guard on deck during the freezing winter months, staring beyond the handrail into black pitch.

 

Still a stranger.

 

“You need something?” Jack asks; too fast and too brazenly. The shore is as free to walk upon as anything else, but _this_ shore is Jack’s territory. It’s a principle that the townsfolk understand.

 

Newcomers, however, will not - and this man is undoubtedly a newcomer. It’s not simply that Jack has never seen him before, not even his unsteady gait when traversing the sand; that, he has seen in anyone who’s used to cobblestone street or working the fields.

 

It’s in the way this stranger carries himself - different, somehow beyond description - and the look on his face isn’t pinned and posed in the ways that humans look at one another. The skin around his eyes is hard, and his mouth is downturned, but for all the meanness in his look Jack can see that it’s simply the way the planes of his face fall naturally, weighed by gravity and the slackening of so many muscles and nerves.

 

“I was told I could find a fisherman,” the man says. His voice is as strange as the rest of him, warping at the back of his throat to emerge thin and rasping, water wisping across sand.

 

Jack tips his head forward, the semblance of a nod that doesn’t give too much away. “You’ve found him.”

 

The stranger’s eyes drift along the spine of the fishing rod. “I see,” he says.

 

Nothing more is forthcoming and the conversation is stagnating already. “You’ve found him,” Jack repeats abortively, wets his salt-cracked mouth. “What do you want from him?”

 

“What does anyone want from a fisherman?”

 

Jack flushes darkly. The question seems honest, but the answer is childishly obvious and he’s spent enough time at market to know when he’s being laughed at.

 

He knows the answer; knows it like breathing, knows it in each weary step he takes from the entrance of his shack, all the way up the skeletal path from shoreline to town. He knows it in the knots of rope that tuck in against the knots in his back as he carries the weight of so many corpses to market, their silver-slick scales and lolling mouths slipping against one another in a cruel imitation of life. It’s why he is here; why they allow him to be here, and why there is only one fisherman in a town by the sea.

 

One looks for a fisherman for a fish to feed oneself. Still, Jack looks at this man properly for the first time, at his empty hands and the one set of clothes that he’s already wearing, and the real truth reveals itself: _he has nowhere to go._

 

“You got a name?”

 

“Gabriel.”

 

“Like the angel?”

 

“Older,” Gabriel says, and Jack doesn’t quite know what that means.

 

He does not ask for Jack’s name.

 

“If you stay with me,” Jack says, halts, then continues, “if you stay, it won’t be comfortable. You have to earn your keep.”

 

Gabriel’s eyes glitter, black as oil. “I will.”

 

***

 

The remains of the creature loom out of the darkness, and the reminder of its existence punches the air out of Jack when he sees it. The strangeness of the day had all but wiped it from his mind, but its grisly shape - made monstrous in the dark by its slow decay - sends the old dread rushing back.

 

Gabriel does not ask what it is, or even how it came to be here, beached and half-dessicated like this. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Jack, in the dark, unflinching in the face of it and asks: “Are you responsible for this?”

 

Jack swallows back all the less than kind things he has to say about Hanzo Shimada and shakes his head. One unsteady hand strays to his jacket pocket, where the bloody coins sit heavy, and they make a soft clinking sound to the rhythm of the surf as they jostle in his loose grip on them. He is protected. He is safe.

 

To a point.

 

“No,” he breathes, and turns away.

 

Gabriel takes Jack’s modest living in his stride, offering no complaints when greeted with the sight of a single narrow bed that Jack does not take any care to offer him. Instead he repurposes Jack’s ratty and long-disused seabag as a lumpy yet passably comfortable pillow and lays his bare back upon wooden boards as if this was not only expected, but no less than a houseguest should expect.

 

Jack doesn’t rush to stop him. He’d barely cared to pass a glance at the bag tucked between floor and bed-frame in months, feeling no warm feelings towards a pack that seemed best served in weighing him down, and whatever Gabriel’s lack of comfort said about Jack personally was precisely what he wanted it to say: he did not expect, nor remotely care for visitors.

 

To this end he half-expects the stranger to be gone by morning, dissatisfied with what Jack has to offer him, but a fitful night’s sleep yields Gabriel, standing in the open doorway of the shack and watching the tide creep inland.

 

Gabriel evades expectation throughout the first day together. It is expected that he would make the trip into town, to meet an old friend or solicit work or do whatever he came to this part of the world to do. He takes the extra helping of gruel that Jack portions out for the both of them - the sack of oatmeal a long-surviving gift brought by Ana on one of her visits - and waits patiently at the foot of Jack’s bed as he prepares for the long day’s work.

 

When they set off from the shack, it is together, Gabriel carrying the bait box and Jack the fishing rod, and the extra hand is quietly appreciated.

 

“Sleep well?” Jack grunts at him, hours later, when the line is in the water and Gabriel is standing in pseudo-vigil at his side.

 

“Like the dead.”

 

Jack huffs a laugh into the collar of his jacket, amused despite himself. He doesn’t _want_ to like this stranger, but the man is infectiously likeable in that he doesn’t wish to be liked at all.

 

They talk intermittently, but the conversation is never lost in the mire; if a subject is exhausted then there is no move by either of them to pick it back up again. Jack learns quickly that Gabriel’s humour is a little like a bullwhip: held loosely, the suggestion of it already drifting on the wind before it strikes, with a serious bluntness that prevents any easy laughter in the face of it. It’s grim, sometimes bloody, and Jack could get used to it.

 

When a fish is caught, Gabriel does not cringe away seeing its flailing body fights uselessly against the dry planks of the dock. He watches in silence as Jack unspools the stringing cord and threads a needle through its gaping mouth, ties it off, and dumps it back into the water. After the first catch he slips the stringer’s picket - usually affixed to the edge of the dock - into the lining of his boot, and the movements of his catch travel through the cord and assure him none have slipped free.

 

Through all of this, as one fish becomes two, then three, Gabriel says nothing, and only moves to assist under Jack’s instruction.

 

At the close of day, Jack braces the picket against the dock and drags the full day’s catch out onto the deck, a line of them one after another, thrashing under the dusken sky, and he takes the blunt end of the picket and brings it down on each one. He rises, back and legs protesting after remaining in one position for so long, and throws the string of fish over his shoulder, their movements slowing along the length of his spine.

 

He turns, one arm already reaching for his baitbox, only to discover it is no longer where he had left it. Its handle is held firmly in Gabriel’s grip, hanging at his side, and when their eyes meet he can see the words that Gabriel will not say for fear of being taken as insult.

 

_Let me help._

 

They start south together.

 

It only occurs to him the morning after, when he wakes and Gabriel is once again standing at the shack’s entrance, light pooling in the hollows of his broad shoulders, that it may not be the tide Gabriel is watching.

 

***

 

Gabriel brings him a branch of living coral, and Jack tries not to read too much into it.

 

At first he is perplexed, driven to question _how_ and _why_ , but he is starting to learn that those kind of questions resist any kind of clear explanation when it comes to Gabriel. How Gabriel has managed to acquire coral in waters that are too cold for it to grow is something that Jack cannot answer.

 

“That is not the part that matters,” Gabriel argues when pressed on it, and Jack doesn’t have to ask him what does, for it can only be this: the moment in which it passes hands from Gabriel to Jack.

 

The coral itself is like nothing he has ever seen. Appearing luminescent even in direct sunlight, it is a mottled, veined purple when Gabriel first presses it into his palms, but by early evening it has deepened to a throbbing, arterial red. This proof of life is a contradiction; Gabriel had gifted it to him with bare hands, and Jack had made no move to preserve it in water likely to kill it anyway. Yet it persists, and when Jack sets it by his bedside its changing hue casts the walls of the shack in murky shadow like an underwater cavern.

 

This is not the only thing that Gabriel gives him. There are rare and unusual shells, a handful of them, each showing signs of having once housed a hermit crab. He presses each to Jack’s ear like his mother had done when he was still young, babbling like a freshwater brook and making castles out of sand.

 

Except he can’t hear the air rushing through it like a counterfeit tide; instead, there is a far-off whistling, a song that he has heard before but can’t quite recall in full. He makes a home for them in a corner of his tackle box as a means to study them in his spare time, but when it is his own hand holding them they are wholly silent.

 

It is the third gift, which Gabriel presents to him as nonchalantly as if it were any old curio that one can find by the sea, that sends him groping for meaning in these silent offerings that seem to beg Jack’s approval despite how coolly they’re thrust upon him. It comes to him immediately, as if it were waiting for him to catch up all along.

 

He stares down at the fat sea slug feebly writhing in Gabriel’s bare-handed grip, rippling with rows of gems studded down the length of its gelatinous body and asks, “Are you courting me?”

 

Gabriel’s smirk is a curl of smoke passing across his face, half-obscured by his beard. “Would you find that so surprising?”

 

It would be more surprising if Jack didn’t, but only just. Alone, he has had time to see himself as he truly is, and has accepted that the want singing in the bones of others will never be directed towards him. He is old, and scarred, and burdened by a belief that is fast slipping from the world and into absurdity.

 

Maybe if he were younger, and brighter, but like this he is only a fisherman, and they both know the only reason one would ever want a fisherman.

 

The slug is dead by the time they reach home. The box of matches tucked between mattress and bedframe are an abandoned souvenir from the days where he would share cigarettes with Ana, but they have served him well in later years and he hands them freely to Gabriel. He takes a small carving knife and cuts out the gems from the slug’s flesh while Gabriel urges the blackened remnants of the fire-pit behind the shack to burn.

 

Sharing the evening meal with Gabriel is what he is quickly coming to expect, even anticipate. It is not much different from any other day prior to his arrival, but with an extra pair of hands to make the job easier. It is their routine, well-versed even in so few days spent together: Jack prepares the meat, while Gabriel prepares the means to eat it.

 

The fire’s light sends flickering shadows across the bared bones that lie just beyond its circle, and in the creeping dark the ribs of the creature resemble fingers grasping wildly for the stars. It flickers across Gabriel, too, casts his features in a constantly shifting illusion of shadow. Jack watches it dance along the jut of his cheekbones, the cut of his jaw, and idly wonders at the twinge of jealousy rippling out from the core of himself, low in his belly, as if the fire’s heat has touched him too and drawn him in with how teasingly it plays across Gabriel’s face.

 

Gabriel is undoubtedly, unquestionably handsome. The fact he is a man means little to Jack. At war there was only men - Ana being the only exception, and though they had spent many nights in the same bed during the sum of their time together he had never wished for it to have escalated beyond sleep. Gabriel is speckled with sand, and the slime from the slug’s body is shining and translucent in his cuticles as he bends his head to eat, but he is still attractive in a way that filters warmth to Jack in places that have been cold as stone for decades.

 

But this is all superficial, and his attraction runs deeper than the landscape of his body. Gabriel rarely smiles, rarely asks questions - never asks anything from Jack outright. Nor does he balk at the monotonous evening meals comprising of a portion of the day’s catch, parted from its bones and cooked over campfire. They sit at the edge of the dock together in grim companionship and it’s the closest Jack has ever been to content.

 

Jack sinks his teeth into the thick, gummy body of this gift bestowed upon him, the revelation of Gabriel’s pursuit of him, and wills himself not to retch.

 

“It’s disgusting,” he remarks after the first swallow, and Gabriel laughs, and laughs, and the sound catches on the burning embers of the fire and is sent up wildly into the night.

 

***

 

Jack does not know where to find singing coral shells; nor does he have any clue where to find sea slugs, save for the ocean floor. Following that line of thought too far raises the question of how _Gabriel_ had found one - especially one so fat and dazzling in colour, nothing like the gobs of grey slime that wash ashore half-dead - which is merely one in a series of unanswered questions that would serve to drive him mad if he dwelled upon them for too long.

 

But this is how Gabriel had sought to confess his growing fondness for Jack, and Jack wishes to respond in kind, in a language he knows Gabriel speaks. Words are hard for them both. They have never served Jack to any great degree, and after years of solitude it becomes easier to speak with actions than with words. Perhaps Gabriel understands that; perhaps this is why he decided to court Jack in this way, confident that they would reach an understanding without picking apart the meanings behind small, fickle words such as _love_.

 

Jack may have been slow to catch on, but he can’t deny that Gabriel’s method had saved them so much time.

 

It is difficult, to find a suitable gift. He is not one to scour the beach for trinkets; not like the treasure seekers, who scan the shores with their electromagnets and hope to come upon some washed-up loot from a fallen ship’s hull. Moreover, Gabriel is a near-constant presence at his side, and quick to assist. If Jack interrupts their twice-daily march across the beach in order to sift through sand then Gabriel will gladly go to his knees to help him find whatever it is he is looking for and thus defeat the purpose of the exercise.

 

There are few options, and fewer opportunities. And then one evening he rounds the shack after relieving himself and realises it’s staring him in the face.

 

The creature’s body is something akin to a monument now: at very first glance arresting, urging one to give pause. But the commuter’s seasoned eye slides right over it as if it were as unremarkable as the rest of the landscape, and as superstitious as Jack may be he cannot keep jumping at a shadow that remains so enduringly still and silent.

 

He approaches it for the first time since its gutting, and this close he can see the soupy remains of its insides even through the gloom. The Shimadas did their work well, as Jack knew they would; whatever organs this creature needed to persist - whether they be as familiar as a whale’s or otherwise - are long gone, along with the blubbery reside that sailors so love to hoard for themselves.

 

They have taken almost everything of value, but Jack is not here for anything the Shimadas were eager to take. His gaze follows the curve of its spine, each vertebrae knobbled and lacking the prehistoric flair of so many spines, and he cannot ignore how uncannily human it seems, amongst all this maritime gore.

 

“You’ve been gone a while,” Gabriel remarks when Jack crosses the threshold, hands buried in his pockets and shoulders hunched.

 

“I could go into detail why but you wouldn’t like to hear it,” he replies, the hope to mask his intentions making him snappier than usual. But Gabriel doesn’t pry, and he doesn’t seem offended, and so they lapse back into amicable company for the remainder of the evening.

 

When the time comes to retire, Jack lies in the dark and strains to hear the change in Gabriel’s breathing as he drifts unconscious, then waits a little longer before retrieving his carving knife from where he had slipped it under his pillow.

 

It is difficult to work in the dark, even more difficult when the noise of blade against bone is comes jaw-clenchingly loud to his ears, and the slightest movement or hitch of breath from his unsuspecting lodger has him scrambling to feign sleep.

 

Occasionally he is forced to pause, bringing a hand to his mouth when the knife slips and draws blood but slowly, steadily, the bone is hollowed and honed and takes a shape that is not dissimilar to how it begun, but with vastly different meaning. By morning it resembles something he would expect to find displayed on the jeweller’s stall at market, even as the daylight reveals the nicks he had accidentally and irreparably made along its surface.

 

It is too small; perhaps it could fit the delicate fingers of a woman, but would certainly be stopped short by a man’s second knuckle. He knows this, and passes a discarded length of fine chain through the middle of it in a final, hopeful flourish.

 

“I’m not much of a craftsman,” he mutters, the ring and chain in his open palm by no means a facsimile for a jeweller’s display, but that he awkwardly proffers at Gabriel regardless.

 

 

He knows that Gabriel can see the depth of meaning in it. Jack cannot bring himself to meet his gaze, but the fresh scrutiny in Gabriel’s eyes is a brand that sears through him, makes him feel cut open and exposed. It is the remnants of a dead thing, repurposed to fit the quiet possibility of something more than they are, but Gabriel can see the sleep deprivation tugging at the corner of his eyes, at the fresh and smarting cuts that litter his hands - all of it laid bare.

 

Gabriel sees it all because this is how they understand one another, and closes his hand about the band of bone and Jack’s waiting, quavering palm.

 

“Where did you get this?”

 

“From the sea.”

 

“From the creature you are not responsible for?”

 

Jack flinches, against the accusation and the stinging lash of rejection.

 

“Yes,” he says, and can say no more.

 

A beat. Then another. Then Gabriel’s hand retreats, the slide of bared palm against bared palm interrupted by the ring caught between them, and it is this simple touch between them that assures Jack his gift has been accepted.

 

***

 

There is a shadow in the water the like of which Jack has never seen before.

 

It is an immense dark mass that cuts through the foamy white cresting the surface and heading straight for the line. Jack’s head lifts in his chair incrementally, shifts his weight from knee to knee, and bites back the thrill of a big catch. It’s too far out for it not to simply be a trick of the light: a glob of seaweed, or the strip of hull from a far-off wreck, and Jack is too seasoned to celebrate ahead of time. He takes quiet faith in the hook he has made, and the bait he has chosen for today. The rod remains loose in his hand.

 

Whatever it is, the sloping shallows force it to rise to the surface as it drifts closer, hunger making its movements purposeful. A dorsal fin cuts through the water, listing backwards in its saddle and tapering to a menacing point that Jack has seen before. The body rises, frothing seafoam clinging to its black flesh, pristine and dazzling under the cold sun, whose blinding light is turned on Jack as he watches. It has his hand lifting reflexively to shield himself, to hide it from his sight, as the creature that was once dead crests the edge of the dock -

 

“Jack.”

 

\- and Gabriel is here, voice cresting over the wall of his reverie like a storming wave, and the edge of the dock is clear. There is nothing ahead of him but the horizon, yet as Jack shakes off the fog of sleep he has to remind himself: _the creature is still dead._ It is torn in two, half of which now rests in pieces upon a market stall far away. It cannot reach him here.

 

His hand strays to his jacket pocket, and the sea-coins shift under his palm, clinking softly as they jostle together in so small a space, and the sound calms the jackrabbit racing of his heart.

 

The fishing rod is unusually light in his grip, and when he angles it to attention finds it missing bait and hook and most of the line itself. He mutters a curse with no strong feeling; who knows how long he’s been sitting there, wire trailing uselessly in the water. The line itself is strong, enough to resist being dragged away by the current, which can only mean the catch was stronger, the prize more bountiful. And it had freely slipped away with Jack’s hook in its mouth.

 

This drifting must not become a habit.

 

He brings the rod in, reaches down to see what he can dig out from the bait box to go about repairing it and is interrupted by the gentle brush of a hand at the crook of his elbow.

 

“Come with me,” Gabriel says. It’s too soft to be an order. It’s not a question either, and even if it were he couldn’t bring himself to refuse. Jack nods, slow and certain, and when Gabriel takes his hand loosely in his he can feel his whole body overcome by a strange weightlessness, tethered to this one point of contact and drifting with no real purpose of its own.

 

The sand under his feet - usually hard-packed with pebbles tossed up from distant shores and the scree cast off from the bluffs above - grows softer as they make their way along the curve of the shoreline. The shape of it reminds Jack of the curve of his fishing line and the myriad questions that surround his existence here, on this beach made his only by the willing exclusion of everyone else; the questions that surround the stranger merely an arm’s length ahead of him.

 

Slowly, ever so slowly, Jack is pulled like a buoy beyond the turn of the cliffs, off course and drifting further, with his eyes cast low on the point of contact between himself and this stranger, the twining of hands and how _well_ those bones fit together despite their number and despite the complete lack of familiarity with one another. Jack does not know this man. He knows, the longer they are touching in this frighteningly simple, human way - the way that children touch and grasp and lead one another - that it is very possible no one else knows this man either.

 

There’s nothing to mark this part of the beach in any way different from the rest of it. Jack has mapped the land well, keen eyes aware of every dip and crevice in the bluffs, and so when Gabriel veers in their direction he is utterly perplexed. The rock before them is a solid wall, lined and wrinkled with age and the onslaught of storms, crumbling in places and speckled with emerald moss. It is as unremarkable as the rest of itself, and he cannot see what could possibly interest Gabriel so much that he would feel the need to drag him away.

 

Then, Gabriel steps through a fold in the rock.

 

The illusion is dizzying to look at. When viewed from the shore, the cragged ridges of the cliff face appear to travel in one impassable formation, the cracks and splinters lining up to each other perfectly, and Jack had never given it much scrutiny when its aspect had appeared so plain to him. But the pivot of a half-turn at its foot and a fissure of darkness opens up to perception, then sinks back into obscurity if one goes too far.

 

Jack is certain that this secret place could only be found if it were already known, if one were looking for it.

 

From within, there is the soothing sound of flowing water, that spills through an opening and onto the floor of the cave and blends in harmony with the tide at his back.. It travels in carved rivulets that form curious shapes - shapes that Jack has picked up along the way, by the salty sea dogs and paranoid quartermasters that refuse to allow their captain to sail without the proper provisions to ward and protect. They are the same pleas to higher powers as those he submits with blood and coins and candles.

 

But these are crafted by rivers of precious metal, glimmering under the lizard’s eye of daylight streaming in from behind them, and he is struck with the revelation that the hollow insides of the cliff are shaped by more than sandstone. He overtakes Gabriel, hand slipping out of his grip as he takes in the scene in front of him, awed beyond measure.

 

“This is -”

 

“Man-made,” Gabriel finishes for him. When Jack turns to look at him, his eyes flick upward, the whites of them bared and urging him to follow their lead.

 

He does so, and is greeted by a cavernous ceiling comprised of as many colours as his eye can perceive, arches cut into stone and decorated with burnished trimming and fine filigree. It is an ornamental hoard designed to seduce raiders and yet stop them entirely in their tracks, for a small band of thieves couldn’t possibly hope to snatch more than a fragment of precious metal from their lofty place above their heads.

 

But there is no sign of life. There is only metal and stone, and the absence of any human soul is telling, for the same hands that shaped these riches could never have so willingly parted from it. All the wards, all the rituals they had spent months to surround themselves - that they had so profoundly trusted would keep them safe - had been for nothing. The guards are long gone. Whatever had come for them, it had not saved them.

 

He drops his gaze to find Gabriel looking directly at him, nothing but the shallow pool of water that makes up the very centre of the warding sigil separating them.

 

“The fishermen used to come here, long ago.”

 

Gabriel’s voice is strange, changed by the confines of the cave and its vaulted roof. It does not sound like him; or rather, it does, but another kind of him, his words amplified so that they could no longer comfortably fit inside a human throat. It is as if something else is speaking, something greater, and Gabriel is the marionette to entertain and distract.

 

Jack is not afraid. Like the cave’s entrance, it is just another illusion.

 

“They were closer to the water this way,” Gabriel continues.

 

They meet in the middle of the warding circle, that coincides with the arching ceiling’s highest point. Jack’s boots can withstand the assault of seafoam and the swampy quagmire of wet sand that stretches for miles after the ebbing of the tide, but in this water, that runs clear and reflects their bodies back at each other, cold seeps through leather and damp chases its way between the stitching along his sole.

 

“It became a part of them.”

 

When their mouths meet it is like the catalyst to set the ritual in motion.

 

Jack does not recall what it is like to be kissed but he had always thought it to be a little like drowning, and he is right. His lungs are full of Gabriel; he cannot breathe like this, the air chased from his body, and yet he persists, trying to sustain himself through the press of human intimacy. Gabriel’s hand is in his hair, fingers tangling as they push through the fan of grey and curl delicately around the base of his skull.

 

It should frighten him, the hold Gabriel has on him in this forgotten dark place. It doesn’t. Instead it makes him bolder, urges him to press forward and throw Gabriel off-balance, make the sure hand at the back of his head falter before the strength of a fisherman with nothing much beyond a litany of scars and a handful of coins. Their chests meet, and through the layers of leather and fabric Jack can feel it: the hard press of a circlet of bone, the shy promise of Jack’s affection for its wearer hidden under Gabriel’s clothes and next to his heart.

 

Jack had never seen Gabriel place the chain around his neck. Jack had never doubted.

 

He does not recall placing his hands upon Gabriel’s shoulders, but he relishes the slow slide they make down his body all the same. Gabriel is built like a soldier, like a man honed to kill, and this the kind of man that Jack knows, can understand. He does not expect Gabriel’s abdomen to jump under his questing fingers, but it does, and he does not expect Gabriel’s free hand to take a fistful of his jacket at the base of his spine and drag his lower body in, but it does.

 

This close, they are like two parts of the same animal, two pairs of lungs breathing in counterpoint to one another: Jack’s too fast, Gabriel’s too slow, as Jack knows his own breathing can be when a lucrative prize noses at his hook. At once there is a shift, and Jack’s exhale is swallowed up by Gabriel’s inhale as they break for air.

 

“What are you?” Jack breathes, the bitter sea breeze chafing at his throat so sweetly soothed by the warmth of Gabriel’s breath at his lips and sending his head spinning,

 

“I’m the tide, Jack.”

 

Jack inhales, exhales, and lets himself be washed away.

**Author's Note:**

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